The present invention relates generally to mailing machines having a postage meter which prints postage indicia on envelopes or tape, and more particularly to such mailing machines in which the tape handling mechanism is physically incorporated into a module mounted in one location in the mailing machine.
Prior art mailing machine have long been well known and have been widely accepted in all forms of commercial establishments from the largest of high volume mailers down to the smallest size businesses and professional offices. Broadly speaking, a mailing machine consists of a postage meter which prints postage indicia on an envelope or a strip of tape, and a feed base for feeding successive envelopes or a strip of tape past the postage meter, and ejecting either for further handling. Over the years, mailing machines have been available in a variety of sizes in terms of rate of operation and level of technical sophistication in terms of degree of automation, both commensurate with the type of establishment in which they are to be installed. Thus, for example, a machine found in the mailing room of a high-volume mailer such as a credit card billing office might process several thousand envelopes per hour, with automatic feeding, flap moistening, sealing and stacking. Similarly, a machine found in a small professional office might require manually feeding one envelope at a time into the feed base and do nothing more than print the postage indicia on the envelope and eject it.
Obviously, there are many variations between the extremes described above, and a large variety of machines have been designed and marketed to meet the mailing requirements of establishments whose mailing volume falls between these extremes. One important characteristic of machines falling in this category is that they have the capability of printing postage indicia either directly on envelopes as they are fed along a feed path through the mailing machine, or on a strip of tape, either gummed or adhesive backed, which is dispensed from the mailing machine for an operator to apply to an envelope which cannot be fed along the normal feed path to the printing device. This is a feature normally not incorporated into the smallest of mailing machines for the reason that the cost of tape feeding mechanisms would not be attractive to such low volume mailers that they would be willing to pay for a feature which would be used very infrequently.
Thus, the bulk of the development of tape feed mechanisms for mailing machines has been in the mid-range size, and particularly in machines in which it is anticipated that the user not only generates a fairly large volume of regular mail which can be automatically fed through the mailing machine, but also generates a substantial amount of mail which is either too large or too bulky to be fed through the mailing machine and therefore must have postage applied manually, either in the form of stamps or postage indicia printed on tape. Assuming that the user wishes to avoid the use of stamps, it becomes highly advantageous to incorporate a functionally efficient and cost effective tape handling and printing mechanism into the mailing machine.
While many successful machines incorporating tape printing capability have been designed and marketed, several disadvantages of including this feature have become apparent. Among the major drawbacks of these machines are that the structure for providing this capability has been relatively complex, has considerably increased the size of the mailing machines over what would be required without this feature, and has greatly added to the cost of the machines. Traditionally, the tape feed mechanism has been placed below the feed deck of the mailing machine so that the tape could be fed along the same path as an envelope through the printing device in the postage meter. This required providing room below the feed deck for a relatively large size roll of tape, and including the complex structure necessary to bring the tape up above the feed and through a guiding mechanism which guided the tape through the printing device and beyond. The physical space required for this mechanism resulted in the bases of prior art mailing machines being quite high, usually in the order of eight to ten inches. When the postage meter is added to that height, the end product tends to be rather bulky, difficult to service and not susceptible to good utilization of space in an otherwise crowded office or mail room.
Another disadvantage of prior art mailing machines is that when the tape is fed in the same direction through the mailing machine for cutting, printing, and ejection from the mailing machine, the piece of tape on which the postage indicia is printed is difficult to handle because a single piece of tape ranging from about 2 to 4 inches in length, depending on whether an advertising slogan is included with the postage indicia, must be moved through the printing device and beyond. Thus, the mailing machine must have relatively complex structure for physically handling a small strip of tape and feeding it to, through and beyond the postage meter printing device.